Hi guys,
What are your experiences on providers for the above?
At present I am with TalkTalk and find their service to be poor. After changing to so-called fast broadband, the price almost doubled and my email service slowed to almost stop!
I am looking for email, UK anytime calls free, catch-up & record TV.
Anyone had experience with Humax freeview play boxes?
Maurice C.

P.S. Very non-technical dinosaur!

from personnel experience

DO NOT TOUCH VIRGIN

a not satisfied customer, waiting to go elsewhere

I've been with Virgin for over 10 years no problems, don't have a TV and only a landline phone, broadband about 90M + nominally classed as "up to 100M" Phone calls mostly free except for some premium numbers and calls over about 40 minutes.

I've used PlusNet for many many years, since the days of dial-up internet in fact. Broadband always rock steady. I upgraded my broadband to fibre-to-the-cabinet at the start of March lockdown to ensure decent performance working from home and with son back from Uni. 


I also moved landline to PlusNet at that time as part of the upgrade deal (previously always with BT). Haven't noticed any difference at all with the landline.


Trooli have been flogging their ultra fast fibre-to-the-premises on our road and people are saying it's great, but it's a lot more expensive and more than I need for two home workers during the day and a bit of gaming & NetFlix in the evenings. 

Over the years I have been with Sky, TalkTalk, Plusnet and Virgin. All have provided acceptable service for internet and email.

Sky were fine, but I wanted to get away from the cost of Sky TV and moved to TalkTalk for their offering.

TalkTalk messed up my order; messed up the replacement order; took weeks of tooing and froing, with multiple missed appointments, dropped calls, etc., to solve a line fault, leaving us with no internet for 3 weeks; failed to provide the TV package due to a transition from Project Canvas to Youview, but kept lying that we would have it next month for six months; then refused to cancel my contract (despite them not providing what I'd signed with them for); I only got out without penalty when the Indian call centre accidentally connected me to a UK call centre.

Plusnet failed to change my static IP address when I repeatedly requested them to do so as we were being targeted by Chinese/Vietnamese/Rumanian IP addresses trying to break into our home server. They weren't getting in, but the router was struggling to cope and slowing our connection to a crawl. I had to temporarily close all the external ports that we use and then spend about £300 on a business grade router with more security and the power to cope with processing it all.

I've not been with Virgin long enough to find any problems.

Generally I think that all the ISPs are as good as each other when things are working and all as bad as each other when things go wrong.

As for TV. I have a Humax FVP-4000T and found it buggy and with a painfully slow user interface. For more than 2 years now I have been using Open Source, Linux based, satellite boxes, running OpenVIX. I find them good, but would not recommend them for anyone that is not technically very proficient. Even then, catch-up is not easily available.

There are many Freeview and Freesat boxes available and I'm sure that most of them will be fine.

@mojo

We chucked out a Panasonic freeview recorder because it kept taking days off. We now have a Humax.

It will record a lot more programmes at once than a Panasonic, but I agree it is a bit slow and buggy. I wouldn't go back to the Panasonic, though.

The main issue with the Humax was its habit of occasionally chopping off the last couple of minutes or so of a programme. This can be a bit irritating. We've got round it by programming 'padding' at the end of a programme (we put it in at the beginning too). This isn't exactly prominent in the instructions, but once I found it on the internet it wasn't technical at all.

If you buy a Humax, hopefully yours will be fine. If it turns out to need the tweak too, I can point you in the right direction. If I can do it, you can do it!

From one non-techie to another

We're with Sky and find it totally reliable.

We switched to Plusnet for about 12 months around 6 years ago and that was a complete disaster so back to Sky we went.
But......it just depends I think, so go with the deal which suits you best.

Been with Sky for ever and, tempting fate, have had no complaints. When there has been the odd issue they've always sorted it quickly. Downside is they're a bit more expensive but I'd rather pay more for something that works than less for something unreliable.

I'm with Virgin for TV, Internet and phone. No real problems and I get 150Mb on a normal day. It's fibre to the box at the end of the road and copper to the house.

Have been with Sky since we moved into this house.

I was very sceptical when told what speed I could get out of the phone socket here in the sticks (40M), but must be fair and say it's pretty much faultless.

This may have something to do with the fact we can see the cabinet from our front window....

The only downside I find with Sky is that they can be quite keen to get you to take up TV packages. We actually removed 2x sat dishes from the house when we moved in so have no desire for sat TV.

If you stick to your guns they will give you a decent deal on just Broadland and landline.

If you want TV as well I am sure they will be delighted to have you!

Skyline2uk

Another satisfied Virgin customer, never really had any major issues and yes their customer services could be a lot better but the broadband is reliable. When we moved house about 6 years ago the fella who came to connect our services to the new house asked if we would like to keep our old phone number as we had moved to a different dialing code area, just 5 miles from our old address. He nipped off to the exchange and set it all up for us, which saved us a lot of bother telling friends and family that we had a new number. Also when our Tivo box went down we had a new one fitted within 24 hours, can't complain at that.

like the majority of Virgin customers in Burgess Hill I lost all Virgin services on the morning of the monday before christmas, and in spite of 'no recorded issues in your postcode' it was wednesday morning before services were restored.
any chance of speaking to anyone ?
of course not, blah blah - covid - blah - one hour wait for advisor - blah .

did manage to set up text updates, luckily mobile is with Tesco and not beardie or would have been totally stuffed.
series of messages, most of which contradicted the previous one and the recorded message on their call centre.

any contact from them since ?
only my monthly useage statement, which I have to access via myvirgin, which although their phone system accepts my password, doesn't .


the only way to speak to anyone who [1] speaks english and [2] actually listens to you as opposed to simply reading a script is to select 'I'm thinking of leaving you'.

worst decision even was to choose to have phone / broadband/tv all from one supplier. great when it works, hell when anything goes wrong and you can't get hold of anybody.

Just to add something to the debate using personal experience:

Whilst the contact point for these companies is generally a central entity, the quality of your local service is down to whoever is employed or most likely sub-contracted to do it.

Beloved worked for a small firm who did Virgin work in the Bristol / South West area.

When I was with Virgin in Bristol it was great (less so when outside fibre coverage).

My mum tried to be hooked up in London and ended up with her front lawn live.

It's very much a case of who does the work!

Skyline2uk

Never been that worried about having masses of TV program choice, just pick and choose what I like and use an old Panasonic DVD player/hard drive recorder for a few things that probably would never show up in the catch-up services. And to play our small collection of pre-recorded or TV copied DVDs of course.

For TV we have Freeview - just the standard free service that includes the regular catch-up services (BBC, ITV, All 4, etc) available using wifi and our broadband connection.
Recently my stepson has added us to his 'family' list on his Netflix account so for a while we have plenty of free choice there (free to us anyway) when we get the main channels airing yet another load of old dross, repeats, or trying to convince us that life revolves around cooking fancy meals, buying and selling antiques/tat, renovating old stuff and selling it, buying/selling/moving/improving houses, and watching others living their exaggerated reality. Oh yes, and awful game shows that must have been put into the schedules to encourage me to switch off the TV and claim my life back.

Internet comes through John Lewis Broadband, a not at all disguised PlusNet service, which also includes the landline phone (evenings and weekends free calls). Calls at other times we use our mobiles, and don't pay much every month for their plans.

As for TV subscription services - we won't miss Netflix if we lose it, and won't be signing up for anything anytime soon. We'd rather spend the money on something else, like .... er.... trains! (and whatever she wants too.)

And thus far we have never had any problems with any of our current service providers (7 years JLB, twenty years Tesco Mobile) Prior to that we had six years with Virgin TV/Broadband, an experience that was not dreadful but I would not repeat it, even if it was available here on the wild Fens. Prior to that we had a steam driven TV, a phone that had a wire linking it to a ringing box that had another wire going into the wall, and the computer played tennis and space invaders, and 'internet' was where the ball went when Cobblers rarely scored a goal.

We were with TalkTalk for a few years but their customer service is very poor (I still get spam phone calls from time to time). We've now been with PO Broadband (yes, really) for a couple of years. Good value and had no problems so far. For TV we stick to Freeview and we have a little Roku box for when we want to watch something on catch-up or Youtube. No subscription required unless you want to watch Netflix or similar.

Cheers,

Chris